Conflicting Realities at Visions du Réel

The Visions du Réel festival has, since 1969, brought the sleepy town of Nyon on the shores of Lake Geneva to life for ten days each year, transforming it into a meeting point for voices from the global documentary film community. This year’s edition presented a selection of 165 films from as many as 50 countries, with around one hundred of them receiving their world premiere in Nyon. The festival is renowned for discovering new talents in documentary cinema, and many of the films screened here are debut works by young, promising directors. Films compete for awards in four main programme sections: the International Feature Film Competition, the Burning Lights Competition, the National Competition, and the Medium- and Short-Length Documentary Competition.

This year’s programme was strongly marked by the theme of war and conflict, an unavoidable subject for documentary filmmaking in the current global context. In the main competition, My Memory Is Full of Ghosts (Thakerati Maleaa Bel Ashbah) by Anas Zawahri especially stood out. Zawahri, a Palestinian-born director living in Syria, conceived the film as a cinematic elegy dedicated to the Syrian city of Homs, which throughout the Syrian war was relentlessly targeted by opposing factions and has consequently become one of the cities most devastated by the conflict. Zawahri paints a portrait of a city suspended between a past decade that has profoundly shaped it and a future its inhabitants are no longer certain exists, even as they stubbornly remain and refuse to leave. Beneath the portrait of a city in ruins lie the stories of its residents, who, despite experiencing the almost unimaginable hardships of war, search for fragments of normality to cling to within a shattered reality.

In In Limbo (W zawieszeniu), by Ukrainian director Alina Maksimenko, we follow an intimate portrait of her parents, with whom the filmmaker seeks refuge in February 2022 when the Russian attack reaches Kyiv. Amid the not-so-distant echoes of bombs, the three of them try to maintain at least an approximation of everyday life. Maksimenko films a daily reality permeated by tension, a sense of entrapment, and an uncertain future. Her father Tolya feeds animals from the neighbourhood that were abandoned by their owners as they fled, while her mother Tatiana gives piano lessons over the phone whenever the mobile network allows it. The microcosm presented to the audience reveals individual responses to wartime conditions—whether through unusual, war-adapted ways of passing time or through a desperate and stubborn clinging to routine.

Also standing out in the international competition were Kamay by Shahrokh Bikaran and Ilyas Yourish, one of the very first films to focus on the historically persecuted Hazara minority in Afghanistan at the moment the Taliban return to power, as well as the debut feature We Are Inside (Nahnou Fil Dakhil) by Lebanese director Farah Kassem. The latter portrays the director’s attempt, during the final years of her father’s life, to find a shared language with him through Arabic poetry, to which he had been devoted all his life, while outside, on the streets, the unrest of the 2019 Lebanese uprisings unfolds.

In the Burning Lights programme section, dedicated to medium- and feature-length films that demonstrate the boldest and freshest cinematic approaches, significant attention was drawn by A Fidai Film by Kamal Aljafari, the renowned Palestinian visual artist. Constructed entirely from archival footage, the film brings together two strands: excerpts from films and photographs preserved in the Palestinian Research Center in Beirut until they were confiscated by the Israeli army during the 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon, and segments from old Israeli films, which the director weaves together with visual interventions. Through dynamic editing, the film breathes new life into the stolen material and cuts into the official Israeli narrative, portraying the violent history of Palestine from the era of British colonial interests in the region to the present day. In doing so, it creates what Aljafari himself describes as a cinematic sabotage of colonial power.

Also screened at Visions du Réel in Nyon was No Other Land by Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, a film that received the award for Best Documentary at this year’s Berlinale but attracted even greater attention due to the conflicting reactions following the award ceremony, during which the directors spoke out about the situation in Gaza. Through its two directors, who are also the film’s main protagonists—one Palestinian and one Israeli—the film depicts Palestinian reality in the West Bank in all the absurdity of apartheid laws and pervasive violence. Undoubtedly one of the documentary films of the year, it stands out for its directness and for the exceptional creative commitment of its young filmmakers, as well as their unyielding determination to reveal what many would prefer to remain hidden from view.

Petra Meterc